The Brooklyn Rail

The President’s boyfriend now has control of the US government’s checkbook and has access to millions of US citizens’ private information, including, most probably, your Social Security number. On February 1, Musk’s team took over control of the US Treasury’s payment system (which handles $6 trillion each year), including all the financial information of Americans and American businesses contained in this system.

This system, run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service at the Department of the Treasury, is also in charge of distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits and tax refunds to hundreds of millions of people. Acting Treasury Secretary David A. Lebryk resigned when pushed by Musk to provide his people with access to the system.

Musk had already taken over the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and blocked career senior civil servants’ access to computer systems there.

The next day, Musk’s DOGE group accessed classified information from the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which has an annual budget of over $50 billion. Top security officials from USAID tried to stop the Musk team, which did not have the required security clearance, from accessing this information, but those officials were promptly put on leave by the Trump administration and the DOGE people proceeded with their takeover.

Musk’s team consists of six young engineers who are apparently acolytes of Musk and Peter Thiel. After the security breach, Musk tweeted: “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.”

USAID was established in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy as the U.S. government’s humanitarian arm. It dispenses billions in humanitarian aid and development funding around the world each year. USAID fought the apartheid regime in South Africa that Elon Musk’s family benefited from.

Musk posted on X that USAID “was a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America,” and President Trump had earlier claimed he stopped the agency from sending $50 million in condoms to Hamas in Gaza, where they were being repurposed as bombs. In fact, USAID’s Gaza mission is the main agency in charge of ensuring that US humanitarian assistance continues to flow into Gaza.

Musk retweeted a post from General Mike Flynn complaining about “the ‘Lutheran’ faith,” and pointing to federal grants appropriated by Congress to Lutheran Family Services and proclaiming that “this use of ‘religion’ as a money laundering operation must end.” To which Musk added: “The [DOGE] team is rapidly shutting down these illegal payments.” Lutheran Family Services operates senior living facilities.

Elon Musk is neither an elected official nor a federal employee, and he has not been appointed by the President nor approved by the Senate. DOGE has no legal authority at all. Musk is a private citizen, the richest one in the world, now taking over US government systems and deciding where the money goes.

The subject line of the email Musk sent out to all employees when he took control of Twitter in 2022 was “Fork in the Road.” That same subject line was used in the email that went out to federal employees last week, offering them a severance package if they go away now. But America is not a company that can be purchased and re-purposed.

On Saturday, we saw a mass purge of the law enforcement personnel at the FBI, of anyone and everyone who worked, in whatever capacity, on the government cases against the Jan. 6 rioters at the Capitol, many of whom gang beat police officers trying to protect the Capitol and were pardoned and released from prison on the first day that Trump returned to office. The FBI under Kash Patel will become a tool of political retribution and vengeance.

We are seeing the last touches of a tremendous expansion of the power of the executive branch, including ridding the workforce of all government workers that have not pledged allegiance and fealty to Donald Trump rather than the Constitution and the rule of law. Congress is no longer a co-equal branch of government, and there is a conservative super-majority in the Supreme Court that has also pledged allegiance and fealty to Trump.

Late today, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking to reporters during his trip to El Salvador, tried to clean up the USAID mess that Musk’s DOGE made, saying that he has taken over as acting administrator of the USAID, and that parts of it would be moved to the State Department, but the damage has already been done. Protestors outside of the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, where the USAID offices are, held US flags and signs reading “Democracy died in complacency.” Representative Jamie Raskin addressed the crowd, saying “We don’t have a fourth branch of government called Elon Musk.”